To be fucked in Louvre

Is Like the Satisfying Finale of a Prestige Drama

Even if the Carters’ series already hit its peak.

Listening to Beyoncé and Jay-Z’s first joint album as the Carters, Everything Is Love, is a lot like watching the series finale of a prestige-cable drama that you’ve been following for years. You could say the series premiered May 12, 2014, with the leak of the infamous Solange elevator video, which first tipped a broader public off to the turmoil afoot among the Carter-Knowles clan. Or you could date it back to whenever you first started investing your own feelings in this royal marriage, one like no other in American pop. Like many such shows, it’s a tale about the internal conflicts and machinations of a high-rolling family, whose story becomes a kind of extended metaphor for the fraught dynamics of American society.

The consensus is that it reached its dramatic and artistic peak in 2016’s Lemonadeseason, premiered on HBO, in which the female lead unleashed a barrage of charges against her inconstant leading man and the violence of racist patriarchy. A segment of the audience will also stand up for last year’s slower-moving but reflective 4:44storyline, Jay-Z’s look at black masculine repentance and healing under the pressures of white supremacy. So the question with Everything Is Love becomes the signature one of peak TV: Did they stick the landing? Is it an audacious wrench like the Sopranos’ inconclusive blackout, a narrative fiasco like the end of Lost, or a Six Feet Under­–style sentimental summation? (Or, more aptly: however Empire turns out to end?)

You’ve probably guessed. It’s the weepy affirmation. What else could it be from these strivers? Like the fifth act of a hip-hop and R&B Shakespearean comedy, Everything Is Love finds our lovers reunited, their misunderstandings resolved, their vows renewed (Beyoncé: “you fucked up the first stone/ we had to get remarried”), and their family looking ahead to decades of more peaceful prosperity. Outrageous, multiple-mansioned, diamonds-and-watches-and-Lambos prosperity, symbolically tied to an agenda of black capitalism as racial uplift and reparations.

The album’s arrival was perfectly calibrated to bring back memories of some of the series’ strongest moments: Saturday’s London stop on the couple’s On the Run II Tour climaxed with a massive, bold projection of the words Album Out Now. Once again a work no one had been sure was even in the works suddenly arrived as an exclusive on the Carters’ own proprietorial streaming service, Tidal. Beyoncé had pulled another Beyoncé, a usage she winks to (with some grammatical wiggle room) on the simultaneous, nonalbum, standalone single, “Salud!,” in which she toasts to “when your name is a verb.”

And of course the release came with a visual component, like Beyoncé’s past two surprise albums. In this case, it’s an eye-inebriating video for one of the album’s best, most invigorating songs, “Apeshit,” with its surefire tagline to generate stadium shrieks, “Have you ever seen a crowd going apeshit?” In the video, directed by Ricky Saiz (who last worked with Bey on 2013’s “Yoncé” video), the couple stages an occupation of the Louvre like a postcolonial Napoleon and Josephine. They frame their radiant presences and their dancers’ beautiful black bodies as the equals and betters of centuries of Western art masterpieces, by extension reclaiming and revenging themselves on a whole history of cultural exclusion and imperialism. Albeit, since this is the Carters (note the consolidated surname), not so much to destroy that heritage as to merge with and overtake it—as Beyoncé sings on “Lovehappy,” the album closer, “We came, and we saw, and we conquered it all.” Veni, vidi, vici, or however that’s conjugated in the plural and pluralistic.

Reinforcing their M.O., beyond the thrilling intelligence and sumptuous beauty of the video, “Apeshit” marks another logistical coup. Not, as some breathless fans have imagined, because it’s such a big deal to rent out the Louvre—movies shoot there fairly often. No, it’s because their team again kept it a total secret despite the Parisian paparazzi on their trail.

That most fans will see the “Apeshit” video before hearing the album creates one minor issue. The rest of the record is not nearly so action-packed. Everything Is Love announces its blissful conclusion from the start. Save a couple of subplots that I’ll return to, there are not many revelations or events left. But this is where music has an advantage over serial drama, because it doesn’t demand so much plot. With the right harmonies, reveling in love and happiness doesn’t get tedious. To make sure, the Carters have wisely kept this record to a tight 38:17—perhaps also inspired by the current “Yeezy season,” the set of five seven-song albums being produced by Kanye West. The Carters’ release just happens to interrupt that cycle, appearing only a day after the new one by longtime Jay-Z rival Nas.

It definitely doesn’t have the innovative vitality of Lemonade, nor the lyrical depth of 4:44. But it doesn’t needto.

This is where the subplots come in—or spinoff potentials, if you prefer—because even though a Jay/Bey album has been teased for ages, Everything Is Love clearly got finalized recently enough that Jay can lob some grenades into this month’s Pusha T–Drake–Kanye fracas. He skewers a few of Drake’s empire-building affectations on “Boss,” scowls at some of his past collaborator West’s aspersions on their relationship in “Friends,” and on “Lovehappy” replaces Ye’s name with Beyoncé’s (as “Beysus,” supplanting Kanye’s “Yeezus”) when referring to the two rappers’ 2011 duo album Watch the Throne. But considering everything Jay could have said about his associate’s recent, uh, shenanigans, West gets off pretty lightly (perhaps out of sympathy for West’s admitted mental health issues).

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Enri Mato

Enri Mato is an architect and photographer born in 1986 in an artist family. His father was a sculptor and his mother was a restorative, who worked in the Louvre Museum.
He grew up in Tirana, Albania where he discovered his interest in photography and art at an early age. In 2005 Enri moved to Paris to study Photography and Architecture. He later pursued masters dergree in Urban Design between Geneva and Tirana. He graduated with a research project called Remembrance. Through his thriving business Enri had the opportunity to travel the world to share his vision and experiences with an international audience.